About

Hello my name is Nathan. As a day job I teach academy computer classes. My hobby and sometimes side-job is programming.

A little background

I was in High School before I really understood what programming was. My Sophomore year I took an introductory programming course that used QBasic. After completing that the next year I started AP Java. This was when I started getting a real understanding of the power of computers. I only took a semester of the course, but I was hooked. My senior year I took web design, this was a turning point. I had been dabbling with creating my on GUIs in Java, but I was finding it difficult to create anything someone would want to use. In web design though, I found out I could easily create an interface and javascript seemed so much easier and more flexible than Java.

Inspirations

It is worth mentioning that some of my inspirations for writing a blog are Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood and Paul Irish’s blog.

Tech preferences

This may be like starting political or sports debate for nerds, but here is my preferred platforms/services.

The good news is I’m not locked into one specific platform. Now as long as I can keep them playing nicely together.

What is qw3n?

I get this question a lot. This started back when I was in elementary and we needed to create usernames for saved games. Since using your real name was boring. I would create a random string of characters. This quickly got unmanageable trying to remember which gibberish name was yours. So, I looked at the keyboard one day and decided I needed something short, unique and easy to type. Since all good code names need a number I decided to follow the keyboard and use “qw” and the number “3”. The letter “n” is my initial to make it somewhat related to me.

Qw3n was not really meant to be pronounced, but if you must go with the closest phonetic/l33t speak equivalent Quinn. Alternatively some have shortened it to Q which also works.